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Submission + - Intel's New Optane SSD P5800X Is The Fastest SSD Drive Ever Made (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel recently shifted its storage strategy somewhat and is now catering its flagship Optane SSD P5800X, which was formerly targeted solely at data centers, to workstation users. The Optane SSD P5800X is based on a proprietary PCIe Gen 4x4 native controller and it features Intel's second-generation Intel Optane memory. In terms of performance, in some of the first benchmark numbers to hit the web, the drive is an absolute beast in the workloads that matter most for the vast majority of workstation users and enthusiasts. Random reads and writes are exceptionally good and access times at low queue depths are best-of-class. The Optane SSD P5800X's sequential transfers, while strong, aren't quite on the same level as some of today's fastest NAND-based PCIe 4 solid state drives, but they do exceed 7GB/s, which is still extremely fast. Overall it's essentially the fastest SSD ever made. Endurance is off the charts too. However, all of that SSD horsepower comes at a price though, at a little over $2.50 per Gig and over $2K for an 800GB drive. With capacities of 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB, the new Intel Optane SSD P5800X is shipping and available now.

Submission + - Open Source AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Impresses In PC Game Tests (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) PC graphics up-scaling technology is ready for prime-time and the company has allowed members of the press to showcase performance and visuals of the tech in action with a number of game engines. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is vendor-agnostic and doesn't require specialized hardware to function like NVIDIA DLSS which relies on Tensor cores on-board NVIDIA Turing or Ampere GPUs, to accelerate neural network models that have been specifically trained on game engines. In contrast, AMD FSR utilizes more traditional spatial upscaling to create a super resolution image from a single input frame, not multiple frames. AMD FSR then employs a library of open source algorithms that work on sharpening both image edge and texture detail. In game testing at HotHardware, frame rates can jump dramatically with little to no perceptible reduction in image quality, and the technology even works on many NVIDIA GPUs as well. There are currently 19 titles that are available or planned with support for AMD FSR, but with the open nature of the technology and cross-GPU compatibility, game developers theoretically should have significant incentive for adoption to breath new performance into their game titles.

Submission + - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Benchmarks Show Strong Performance Versus AMD's Best (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: At Computex 2021, NVIDIA officially unveiled its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti cards, the latter of which is the company's new PC gaming flagship. The new GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the spiritual successor to the previous-gen flagship RTX 2080 Ti, with a significantly more powerful Ampere GPU, along with 12GB of faster GDDR6X memory. Memory bandwidth, Compute performance, and fill rate are all improved on the RTX 3080 Ti. As configured in the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, the GPU has 10,240 CUDA cores, with 320 Tensor cores, and 80 RT cores. The cards just went on sale yesterday and sold out quickly, as you might imagine, but also the embargo on performance reviews was lifted, showing what the new beastly graphics card can do in a number of PC gaming scenarios. HotHardware's review shows the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is faster than AMD's flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT, especially when ray tracing is involved, but the Radeon did score a couple of key victories. Generally speaking though, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cards aren't quite as fast as NVIDIA's ultra-expensive GeForce RTX 3090. The deltas separating the RTX 3080 Ti and 3090, however, are tiny and would not be perceivable in real-world use. For gamers, the $1199 GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is the clear choice between the two. Although, you're a creator or professional that can make use of the 3090's additional 12GB of memory (24GB total), it remains the king of the hill.

Submission + - AMD Unveils Radeon RX 6000M Mobile GPUs For New Breed Of All-AMD Gaming Laptops (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD just took the wraps off its new line of Radeon RX 6000M GPUs for gaming laptops. Combined with its Ryzen 5000 series processors, the company claims all-AMD powered "AMD Advantage" machines will deliver new levels of performance, visual fidelity and value for gamers. AMD unveiled three new mobile GPUs. Sitting at the top is the Radeon RX 6800M, featuring 40 compute units, 40 ray accelerators, a 2,300MHz game clock and 12GB of GDDR6 memory. According to AMD, its flagship Radeon RX 6800M mobile GPU can deliver 120 frames per second at 1440p with a blend of raytracing, compute, and traditional effects. Next, the new Radeon RX 6700M sports 36 compute units, 36 ray accelerators, a 2,300MHz game clock and 10GB of GDDR6 memory. Finally, the Radeon RX 6600M comes armed with 28 compute units and 28 ray accelerators, a 2,177MHz game clock and 8GB of GDDR6 memory. HotHardware has a deep dive review of a new ASUS ROG Strix G15 gaming laptop with the Radeon RX 6800M on board, as well as an 8-core Ryzen 9 5900HX processor. In the benchmarks, the Radeon RX 6800M-equipped machine puts up numbers that rival GeForce RTX 3070 and 3080 laptop GPUs in traditional rasterized game engines, though it trails a bit in ray tracing enhanced gaming. You can expect this new breed of all-AMD laptops to arrive in market sometime later this month.

Submission + - Synopsys Claims Chip Design Breakthrough With AI Engineering

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Mountain View, CA silicon design tools heavyweight Synopsys is claiming a breakthrough in chip design automation that it claims will usher in a new level of semiconductor innovation that will take the industry above and beyond the limits of Moore's Law (Gordon Moore's observation that the number of transistors in chips double roughly every two years), which is now considered by many to be plateauing. Synopsys' tool called DSO.ai is the world's first autonomous AI tool set for chip design. Synopsys claims its DSO.ai tool can dramatically accelerate, enhance and reduce the costs involved with something called place-and-route. Just as it sounds, place-and-route (sometimes called floor planning) referrers to the placement of logic and IP blocks, and the routing of the traces and various interconnects in a chip designed to join them all together. Synopsys' DSO.ai optimizes and streamlines this process using the iterative nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such that what used to take dozens of engineers weeks or potentially months, now will take a junior engineer just days to complete. DSO.ai iterates on the floorplan and layout of a chip, and learns from each iteration, fine tuning and optimizing the chip within its design parameters and targets along the way. The old semiconductor paradigms are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today, it's about the best transistors, architectures, and accelerators for the job, and the human-constrained physical design engineering effort no longer has to be a gating factor.

Submission + - Intel 8-Core Tiger Lake-H Laptop CPUs Launched And Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Last week, Intel unveiled its Tiger Lake-H45 11th Gen Core processor line-up, for high-performance gaming laptops and mobile workstations. The top-end processor in Intel's new mobile offering is the Core i9-11980HK. The 11980HK is an 8-core/16-thread CPU, with a base clock of 2.6GHz and max turbo clock of 5GHz on one or two cores. The Core i9-11980HK supports DDR4 memory at speeds up to 3,200MHz, along with the latest IO and connectivity technologies as well, like Wi-Fi 6 / 6E networking, Thunderbolt 4, and support for Resizable BAR for graphics, thanks to Intel's close collaboration with NVIDIA on this launch. Tiger Lake-H processors also feature 20 reconfigurable PCI Express 4.0 lanes attached directly to the core root CPU complex. This allows for plenty of bandwidth for a discrete GPU, while also enabling PCIe 4.0 NVMe RAID across multiple M.2 slots, which is a first for any mobile platform. In the benchmarks, the new 8-core Core i9-11980HK offers the best single and lightly-threaded performance of any x86 mobile processor currently. Its multi-threaded performance is also strong, and outpaces all other previous-gen Intel H-Series mobile CPUs. However, it can't quite catch top-end 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS series mobile processors in multi-threaded tests.

Submission + - Intel Unveils Full Tiger Lake-H Processor Line-Up For Higher Performance Laptops (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: In January, Intel officially announced its Tiger Lake-H mobile platform, but today disclosed full details on the new, higher-end variant of Tiger Lake manufactured using 10nm SuperFIN technology, that brings with it a few significant platform enhancements beyond just its clock speed and core count boost. Intel is refreshing the lineup with higher-power and higher-performance Tiger Lake-H45 processors, with up to 8 physical cores (16 threads). In addition, the CPUs feature 20 reconfigurable PCI Express 4.0 lanes attached directly to the processor, which enable PCIe 4.0 NVMe RAID — a first for any mobile platform. The platform features all of the latest IO and connectivity technologies, like Killer Wi-Fi 6 / 6E, Thunderbolt 4, and support for Resizable BAR. There are an array of consumer and commercial Tiger Lake-H based 11th Gen Intel Core H-series processors coming down the pipeline. The top-end consumer SKU is the Core i9-11980HK, which is an 8-core / 16-thread processor, with a base clock of 2.6GHz and maximum turbo clock of 5GHz on one or two cores. What also makes this particular processor interesting is that it is fully unlocked and overclockable via Intel's XTU utility. Intel has shipped millions of units volume to laptop OEMs already and expects to have laptops in market from all of the majors this month.

Submission + - New Chip Vulnerability Renders All Spectre Security Mitigations Useless (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: University of Virginia Researchers have now found a way to effectively circumvent all of the original Spectre mitigations for processors, essentially resurrecting the ghostly security flaw that will now again haunt billions of PCs globally. Ashish Venkat, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UVA Engineering, likens the team's discovery to how security works in an airport. He explained a hypothetical scenario "where TSA lets you in without checking your boarding pass because (1) it is fast and efficient, and (2) you will be checked for your boarding pass at the gate anyway." However, when you are between the metaphorical TSA checkpoint and the gate, something bad could still happen. "A computer processor does something similar. It predicts that the check will pass and could let instructions into the pipeline. Ultimately, if the prediction is incorrect, it will throw those instructions out of the pipeline," notes Venkat. However, at that point it may be too late and these nefarious instructions could leave "side-effects" in the pipeline that an attacker could use to exploit for critical information like credentials, etc. The solution to this vulnerability is disabling a micro-op cache or halting speculative execution. However, this approach wouldn't be feasible since it would simply crush performance features of modern processors.

Submission + - Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Nano Weighs Under 2 Lbs And Is Powered By Intel Tiger Lake (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The new 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Nano is the thinnest and lightest Lenovo ThinkPad ever in the brand's history. The machine weighs just 1.99 pounds (907 grams), while still sporting a fairly powerful Intel Core i7-1160G7 Tiger Lake quad-core CPU, up to a 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of 4267MHz LPDDR4X RAM and a 48 Whr battery. In the benchmarks, the machine holds its own for productivity and content creation tasks as well as a bit of light-duty gaming, versus heavier machines in its peer group. In terms of battery life, the new ThinkPad X1 Nano hangs pretty tough as well, offering about 7.5 hours of constant use up-time with HD video playback. With its 2K (2160X1350 — 16:10) IPS Dolby Vision-certified display and top tier configuration it doesn't come cheap, as you might imagine. The ThinkPad X1 Nano has a current starting price of $1289 and tops out at $2231 for its most powerful configuration and 1TB of fast SSD storage. Regardless, it's impressive what the machine can deliver in terms of features and performance in its weight class.

Submission + - Intel Launches First 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors For Data Centers (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel just officially launched its first server products built on its advanced 10nm manufacturing process node, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. Core counts have been significantly increased with this generation, and now offer up to 40 cores / 80 threads per socket versus 28 cores / 56 threads in Intel's previous-gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher capacity, and copious IO. New AI, security and cryptographic capabilities arrive with the platform as well. Across Cloud, HPC, 5G, IoT, and AI workloads, new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are claimed to offer significant uplifts across the board versus their previous-gen counterparts. And versus rival AMD's EPYC platform, Intel is also claiming many victories, specifically when AVX-512, new crypto instructions, or DL Boost are added to the equation. Core counts in the line-up range from 8 — 40 cores per processor and TDPs vary depending on the maximum base and boost frequencies and core count / configuration (up to a 270W TDP). Intel is currently shipping 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable CPUs to key customers now, with over 200K chips in Q1 this year and a steady ramp-up to follow.

Submission + - Arm Unveils Armv9 Architecture With Emphasis On Security And Machine Learning (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: For the past decade, thousands of Arm-based devices have been employing variants of the Armv8 architecture, which was the first native 64-bit Arm instruction set. Today, however, Arm today announced the Armv9 architecture for next-generation devices. With Armv9, a significant emphasis is placed on three technologies that are growing in importance across multiple sectors: machine learning, digital signal processing, and improved security. To that end, Scalable Vector Extensions v2 (SVE2) have been enabled in the Armv9 instruction set, where it will be tasked with ramping up performance for ML and DSP tasks. Arm also claims that SVE2 has the potential to provide a significant performance uplift in 5G and mixed reality (AR/VR) applications as well. On the security front, Arm is introducing its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA), which "shields portions of code and data from access or modification while in-use, even from privileged software, by performing computation in a hardware-based secure environment." CCA will also usher in the secure sandbox concept of "Realms" to put a partition between secure and non-secure processing domains. With Armv9, it's also promised that annual CPU performance will outpace the average industry growth. More specifically, Arm claims that Armv9 will see "expected CPU performance increases of more than 30% over the next two generations of mobile and infrastructure CPUs."

Submission + - AMD Unveils Radeon RX 6700 XT For Midrange 1440p PC Gaming (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD just unveiled its latest RDNA 2-based GPU that targets 1440p PC gamers, known as Radeon RX 6700 XT. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is built around the company's Navi 22 GPU. In terms of core counts, Navi 22 is effectively a Navi 21 — the "Big Navi" GPU used on the powerful Radeon RX 6900 XT — lopped in half. AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT has fewer CUs and Ray Accelerators (40 vs. 80), and 50% of the total number of Stream Processors (2,560 vs. 5,120). Other parts of the of Navi 22, however, aren't scaled back quite as far. For example, the Radeon RX 6700 XT has 96MB of Infinity Cache, down from 128MB of on the 6900 XT. And the 6700 XT's memory interface is 192-bits wide versus 256-bits on Radeon RX 6800 / 6900 series cards. The 6700 XT also features 12GB of GDDR6 memory (versus 16GB). AMD has set the MSRP for its Radeon RX 6700 XT at $479. That puts its price higher than the competing GeForce RTX 3060 Ti ($399 MSRP), but somewhat lower than the RTX 3070 ($499 MSRP). Looking at the numbers, that's right where the Radeon RX 6700 XT falls in terms of performance with traditional rasterization. Factor ray tracing into the mix, however, and the Radeon falls behind both of NVIDIA's competitive products. Radeon RX 6700 XT card should be available starting today but for sure demand will be very high, so supply will likely be limited.

Submission + - AMD Launches Ryzen Pro 5000 Series Mobile CPUs For Business Laptops (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD expanded its professional line of mobile processors today, with the Zen 3-based Ryzen Pro 5000 series. These new chips target premium business-class and commercial laptops, pairing the company's suite of Pro technologies, including enterprise-class security features, with the power of its latest generation CPU architecture. As with previous-gen Pro models, these latest chips sport enhanced features and capabilities geared towards offering heightened security and robust remote management for IT professionals and organizations. In terms of security, Ryzen Pro 5000 series CPUs take a multi-layered approach with embedded hardware, firmware and software features designed to mitigate malware attacks and support full FIPS encryption. Essentially, AMD's new Ryzen Pro 5000 processors are a subset of the Ryzen 5000 mobile CPU stack, but with Pro features added for commercial applications. The Ryzen Pro 5000 series currently spans 4-core/8-thread, 6-core/12-thread, and 8-core/16-thread options, giving customers a range of performance and price points, depending on need. AMD is planning 18 months of of software stability with 24 months of planned product availability, so enterprise customers can buy into the latest AMD Pro series with a base level assurance of continued support. Top PC vendors like Lenovo and HP are expected to have products in market based on Ryzen Pro 5000 sometime in Q2 this year.

Submission + - AMD Unveils EPYC 7003 Series Server CPUs Based On Zen 3 Architecture (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD announced new additions to its EPYC server processor lineup today, codenamed Milan. The company's EPYC 7003 series brings with it significantly improved IPC and per-core performance, better multi-core scaling, and more flexible memory configuration options, in a package that's socket compatible with its previous-gen CPUs. Like the current AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors, new EPYC 7003 CPUs leverage AMD's new Zen 3 microarchitecture. Unlike its desktop parts, however, EPYC 7003 server processors use much larger packaging and feature up to CPU nine chiplets (up to eight 7nm CPU dies and a 12nm IO die), with up to 64 physical cores and 128 threads per socket. As things stand today, Intel doesn't currently have any Xeon processors that can match AMD in terms of single-socket core density. As such, AMD's EPYC 7003 series should consistently offer better performance in many workloads. Pricing for these new big iron processors ranges from $913 or the 16-core 7313P, and up to $7,890 for the powerful EPYC 7763, which AMD is calling "the world's highest-performing server processor." Though nearly $8K is not cheap, AMD appears to be continuing its aggressive price strategy with the EPYC 7003 series, relative to Intel's Xeon Scalable processors. The company also announced a who's who of data center and cloud service OEMs supporting the new platform, including AWS, Azure, Dell Technologies, HPE, Cisco, Google Cloud, Oracle and others.

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